The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
In some coding standards, a picture may be represented as a coding tree unit (CTU). The CTU may be split into coding units (CUs) by using a quadtree structure denoted as a coding tree to adapt to various local characteristics. The decision whether to code a picture area using inter-picture (temporal) or intra-picture (spatial) prediction is made at the CU level. Each CU can be further split into one, two, or four prediction units (PUs) according to the PU splitting type. Inside one PU, the same prediction process is applied and the relevant information is transmitted to the decoder on a PU basis. After obtaining the residual block by applying the prediction process based on the PU splitting type, a CU can be partitioned into transform units (TUs) according to another quadtree structure similar to the coding tree for the CU.
Certain TUs may only contain coefficients that are zero. Accordingly, performing an inverse transform on these TUs on the decoder side is unnecessary since these TUs do not contain information that is necessary to reconstruct a block. Thus, the signaling of information associated with these TUs unnecessarily increases bandwidth of a coded video bitstream.